


Hug

by PartTwo



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Heavy Angst, Suicide, it's also not at all chelley so if you're looking for that I'm sorry, like seriously this is dark, please read at your own risk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-11 13:20:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19928713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PartTwo/pseuds/PartTwo
Summary: Things were going so well.





	Hug

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this [Tumblr](https://chantillyxlacey.tumblr.com/post/46040100709/soup-brought-up-the-idea-of-chelley-where-one-of) post.
> 
> As we can see, Nemo's Not Doing Great, makin' some good ol' fashioned barely-edited vent art. If you didn't heed those warnings at the beginning, please do so now: **_THIS DEALS WITH SUICIDE AND IS EXTREMELY DARK, IF THIS IS TRIGGERING FOR YOU, PLEASE GO OFF AND FIND SOMETHING ELSE TO READ, I WANT YOU TO BE SAFE AND HAPPY._**

Things were going so well. Yes, things were very, very good given the situation. They escaped, Chell grabbed Wheatley and held on so tight to the little handles on his old body, pulled him back down to Earth against the vacuum of space, and then,  _ then  _ GLaDOS, so moved, so oddly kind for herself, just… 

Let them go. 

Not without a little send-off present. A backpack for Chell, and Wheatley, a new body, the sleek white-casing android sort of body. Human-faced, with a mop of white “hair” that could sense all sorts of data that might be useful for them. Strong but light - a might taller and stronger than Chell - solar panels, waterproof, heat-resistant. He was immortal, as far as anyone needed to know, immortal and capable of protecting his best friend in the whole world. 

And then they were off and out. 

He couldn’t tell you how long they walked, days, probably, the whole while he chattered on and Chell listened, the dynamic since the beginning, before they came across the ruins of a cottage. A small thing, stone on the outside, the roof missing, with an overgrown garden in the back with what looked to be a few kinds of vegetables. Down the way, a lazy moving river, with fish and frogs and all sorts of life surrounding it. “We’ll have to go for a swim,” Chell said, “I think I remember how. Maybe learn to fish.”

The owner of this house? Well, if the roof was any indication, there wasn’t one. There was nobody around for miles, anyways. 

And it was all going  _ so well.  _ Months, months they spent on their little house-rebuilding project. The frame of the old roof was enough for them to slowly be able to hammer on boards Chell got from a town, some ways away. Wheatley was never allowed to come, the secret of Aperture was to say that, secret, and he was a good tell. So he stayed home, worked in the garden and the two of them were happy. 

And things were going well. 

The roof went up slowly but surely, and then, as the last boards were hammered down, Chell looked at him with a smile and gave him his first hug. A hug that felt a little crushing as she squeezed with all her might, face buried into his silicone chest. He enclosed his arms around her, so small, so frail, and hugged like she did - crushingly. 

Crushingly. 

_ Crushingly.  _

She made a little noise, scrambled back a bit, but he wasn’t really paying attention, so caught up in the feeling of  _ affection  _ and  _ loving  _ and the need for her to be close and safe with him that he didn’t notice. No, he didn’t notice her clawing at his arms in his brief ecstasy and he didn’t notice the  _ crack, crack, crack  _ of three ribs, one after another. Then she stopped moving, and for a time, he didn’t notice that, either. 

That is, until he pulled back, holding her at arm's length. He grinned down at her, but she didn’t grin back. Didn’t do much of anything back at all, in fact, her eyes were rather glassy, pulse rather still. 

He stopped grinning. 

He let her go, gently, and watched as she fell like a sack of potatoes, a heap of limbs on the floor. “Love, you uh… You feeling alright?” 

No response. 

Her eyes stared blankly at a point on the wall.

Wheatley scooped her up in his arms and shook his head. “Oh you’ve… Fallen asleep with your eyes open, have you not?” He said, with a flutter of panic somewhere in him. “That’s… Something humans do, right?” 

He carried her carefully to the little bed that sat in the corner of the house and gently laid her there, covering her with the blanket and smoothing her hair back, like putting a child to bed. “Do tell me when you wake, alright?” 

So he went to work in the garden some time, and then spend a little while in low-power mode, and finally, after a day or two - he’d seen her sleep longer,  _ much  _ longer, surely this was nothing to worry about? - wandered back towards her sleeping form with minor curiosity. 

He shook her, slightly. “Love? Love? Time to get up, you’ve been asleep for awhile, you must be starving.” 

Her skin was cold. 

The panic fluttered again, stronger, louder this time. 

He shook her a little harder, her glazed over eyes still staring unfocused at the ceiling. “ _ Chell _ , come on, if this is a joke, it’s not funny!”

He used her name. 

And not even a hint of a response. 

Carefully, he held two fingers to her neck, sensors on the pads of his fingers quickly coming to life, taking a biometric scan. Blood pressure, heart rate, the things that showed on his screens of the ten thousand humans he was in charge of. 

Hers were always stable, and they would be now. 

Right?

_ Right? _

No pulse. No blood pressure. Nothing. She was perfectly still, silent. 

Wheatley choked on the actual word for it, though he knew very well what was the case. Like every other test subject he’d ever cared for, she too fell into the kind of sleep people don’t wake up from. 

He stared blankly at her for awhile, racing mind for once silent, unsure of what to do with himself, with  _ her.  _ He just stared…

  
And then he moved. 

It was like someone else was controlling him, but he didn’t care, it was all the same and it was all quite fine by him. He found the toolkit Chell used to fix the roof and opened it slowly, retrieving a screwdriver, and screw by screw, took off the soft silicone panel that covered his chest, then the hard plastic casing beneath it, leaving open his circuitry. Then, one screw at a time, again, he opened the plastic casing across the back of his head. 

Slowly, hauntedly, he wandered towards her…  _ Sleeping  _ form and picked her up, held her against his chest. He wandered out of the door to the garden, opened and neatly closed the fence behind him, and, treading lightly as possible, wandered towards the river. 

“Let’s take that swim, yeah?” He said, as he locked his arms around her. He stood, back to the water looking down at her. Before he fell back into the water, he felt a brief moment of hesitation, the barest hint of a survival instinct begging him not to. 

He ignored it, rocked back on his heels, and fell into the water. 

It wasn’t quick, nor was it immediate, a moment of everything going wrong. Error message after error message, every sound so impossibly loud that he couldn’t think, they clouded over his vision, fan suddenly spinning so fast - why did it feel like he was overheating? 

It got louder and louder and louder and just when he thought he couldn’t take it anymore,  _ nothing. _

* * *

His body sunk to the bottom of the muddy part of the river, forgotten. She floated on, for awhile, found by the townsfolk who were too horrified to do much, just watched as the rapids carried her away. 

  
But for the next person, who found a little cottage with a slightly-wild garden and the barest smell of death, things were going  _ so very well.  _

**Author's Note:**

> Woooooooo life has been A Time and I wanted to write some vent-art to feel better. It kinda helped, I guess, I’d suggest it if you guys are also feeling bad. Begging your pardon for me not being my usual cheery self. 
> 
> Anywhosies, here's my [Tumblr](https://parttwoactuallywrites.tumblr.com) so you can chat with me, I'd like to hear some concrit 'cause this is my first time posting Proper Angst and I'm not too sure how well I hit the mark. 


End file.
